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WattOS: Is It Faster & Can Save Power Over Ubuntu?

09-30-2011, 04:10 AM

Phoronix: WattOS: Is It Faster & Can Save Power Over Ubuntu?

For some months I've been meaning to try out WattOS, an Ubuntu derivative that claims to do more than providing simple desktop theme changes and other high-level customizations. It seeks to provide a simple and fast desktop that's also said to conserve more power and run better on older hardware, but is this actually the case? Here are benchmarks of WattOS R4 compared to the upstream Ubuntu 11.04 release from which it's derived, and the numbers are quite revealing.

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WattOS should be aimed to productivity workstation under normal usage.
How can OpenArena, H.264 video encoding, gfx rendering, OpenSSL, Apache and password cracking fit this profile?
Your ideas about productivity are at least questionable.
Instead, boot the system, make some word processing, datasheet stuff, a little bit of browsing and leave the machine idle 10 to 15 minutes every 1 or two house.
This sounds more likely to be a "productivity workstation usage".
It's really hard to save power and compete for computing intensive tasks!

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Yeah, the width of the articles is so ridiculously narrow, nothing fits. Font size is also hilariously small. Please, please make the damn thing have a dynamic width and larger fonts. This is 2011, we don't run 640x480 with 75dpi displays anymore.

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I'm planning on getting a new AMD E-450 netbook soon. I'd love to run linux on it, but I'd hate to lose 20-30% of my battery life just by installing Linux.

What distro is the best for battery life? Or should I just stick with Windows 7?

They're going to shoot me for saying this, but I'll say it... Debian Stable beats the snot out of Ubuntu in battery life, it's noticeably better..
Though of course you can also tweak your Ubuntu install to get battery life, as discussed in previous articles.